The Volokh Conspiracy

Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent

It's time to kill off the Soviet Union in cyberspace

Let's retire the .su country code

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Paul Rosenzweig and I have an oped in WIRED on a particularly fitting sanction for Putin's Russia. Here's an excerpt:

By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union was dead.

But not its country code.

Thirty years later, the Soviet Union endures in the imagination of a former KGB officer now in the Kremlin—and on the internet, where you can still register a domain like stalin.su. … Given its lack of positive value (and the happy end of Communist terror) it is long past time for the .su domain to be consigned to the digital graveyard.

And here's the whole thing: The Ghost of the Soviet Union Still Haunts the Internet